Are Americans really getting shorter, and is Ronald Reagan to blame?

Americans are getting shorter. It’s Ronald Reagan’s fault.

These are two takeaways from a fascinating analysis of data from the National Health Interview Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that, among other things, breaks down height by profession.

This self-reporting determined that Americans, who in the 1800s were the tallest in the world, are now shrinking at a noticeable clip, and are no longer among the global leaders in height.

Heads better roll for this one. Except that would make us even shorter. But how did this happen? How did we let countries like Serbia pass us on the old vertical yardstick?

The first thought, according to a data dive performed by The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam, was that self-reported numbers might not be accurate. The tallest profession in America included politicians, who don’t exactly represent the gold standard of veracity. The top five professions in terms of height also include writers and athletes, the only time you will see those two words in the same sentence.

A mesmerizing manual full of government secrets

Yet the data was corroborated by Very Official Statistics recorded by the federal government, in adherence with a 91-page manual explaining to practitioners how to determine height and weight.

In this manual (which I spent more time reading than I care to admit, and is inexplicably mesmerizing) you will learn government secrets for “preventing spillage” of bottles of fluid, which involves “keeping them upright.”

You will also learn about “upper arm bony landmarks” and “marking spine extending from acromion process.” So you can be assured that anyone who finishes reading this manual will in fact be the Tom Brady of height and weight measurements.

And what do you know, this methodology confirms that Americans are shrinking, and by even greater numbers than the self-reported data show.

So now on average, men who used to be closer to 5-10 are now closer to 5-9, while women, who were gaining on 5-4, are now regressing toward 5-3.

“Similarly, a truly immense analysis of expert measurements in 200 countries and territories found that height had slipped among 19-year-old Americans in the late 1990s and 2000s,” Van Dam writes. “Nineteen-year-old American men were the 36th-tallest globally in 1985, but by 2019, they were 47th. Women the same age fell from 38th to 58th, behind China and Lebanon.”

What? Our women have fallen behind the Chinese in height? Somebody get a call into the DeSantis campaign, we’re going to need us a whole mess of elevator boots.

And can we really blame all this on Ronald Reagan?

A deeper dive into the data shows that we reached Peak Tall in 1980, at which point Americans began to shrink. Why? You may recall — oh who am I kidding, you probably weren’t born yet, you little shrimp — the Reagan Administration’s decision that, for school lunch purposes, ketchup counted as a vegetable.

Thus began a long descent in the nutritional value of school lunches, and our long descent in height. Proudly, however, while we might be coming up short in height, we are breaking all records for width. You don’t see any Chinese ahead of us in pants size, do you?

No, because those school lunches are a stew of processed foods, sugar and empty calories that ensure American world leadership in girth — which, interestingly enough, leads to early puberty in young people, which stops bone growth in its tracks. That, Van Dam suggests, when coupled with other nutritional cuts such as food stamps, and growing inequality from the transition of the New Deal into the market-driven economy, explains a lot.

“For the rest of their lives, shorter millennials will bear the physical stamp of the inequality that erupted in their infancy,” he writes.

I don’t know. This transparent effort to make us feel sorry for millennials leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe there is indeed a direct line between tater tots and Zoom meetings, but some abominations are unforgivable, no matter how many chocolate donuts you ate as a kid.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on Salisbury Daily Times: Tim Rowland column: Blame Reagan for shrinking Americans